The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Image via Wikipedia

By James D. Zirin

In 1910, President William Howard Taft appointed a brilliant lawyer named Frederick William Lehmann as his Solicitor General. Representing the U. S. government in the Supreme Court, Lehmann would occasionally "confess judgment," a practice in which the Solicitor General admits that the government has been wrong all along and just drops the case even when supported by a lower court's prior decision. Inscribed in the office rotunda of the Attorney General in Washington are Lehmann's famous words: "The United States wins its point whenever justice is done…."

Lehmann’s guiding principles inform the prosecutor’s duty in the bizarre case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. DSK, a French lawyer, teacher and economist was until May of this year the highly respected Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. He had a promising political career; and, as we all know, was prominently mentioned as a Socialist candidate for president of France. He is detained in New York for the time being, awaiting trial on seven counts of forcible sexual assault on a maid at the Sofitel Hotel in midtown Manhattan. It is apparently undisputed that the two had sex; the issue, as often it is in such cases, is one of consent.

Defendants are not cyphers; they are people. No one can conceivably deny that DSK had the private morals of an alleycat. He engaged in a series of extramarital affairs that would make Don Juan turn green with envy. No one can apologize for his immorality, and I do not do so here.

The case assumes the proportions of high melodrama--a weird encounter in a posh hotel room, a reversal of fortune and fall from grace laced with graphic sexual detail. The lurid charges against DSK have inspired a public feeding frenzy with the case tried out more in the media than in the courtroom where under our system it belongs.